


February Air

by Jenwryn



Category: Death Note
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Fluff, Genderswap, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-11
Updated: 2009-12-11
Packaged: 2017-10-04 08:32:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,979
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jenwryn/pseuds/Jenwryn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>[L/girl!Light]</p><p>She doesn't comprehend, but she feels. AU, in which Kira was apparently mysteriously bested by a certain clever detective.</p>
            </blockquote>





	February Air

**Author's Note:**

> Title has no real relation to anything, except that I was listening to [this song](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLbIyqQ2hp0) as I wrote it. Randomly, I've stuck with using _-kun_, because of a very helpful discussion with, my friend Zeda, about Japanese honorifics (thank you, again!), and because I simply can't imagine Light as making the kind of girl that would be accustomed to being called _-chan_, at least not in general conversation. Aaaand I slapped this together today, so hopefully it isn't major lame-o, ahem. Timeline and setting, as per always with me, are basically vague.
> 
> **Dedication:** For Sabriel75, who is awesome. ♥

There's a mess of clothes and cups on the beside table, when Light opens her eyes, and she doesn't know where she is. Her body aches and her head hurts, but it isn't a hangover, she doesn't think; she isn't sure, because she was never really the hangover type. The sheets are warm-cool against her skin, against her hips, and she's wearing nothing but a singlet. It's straps are down and the brown of her areolae are showing. She sits, and re-arranges herself. The blinds at the window are half drawn up, and she can see the sky flushing with morning, over the sprawl of the city beyond. Tokyo. High rise. Apartment? No, hotel – there's a small sink, visible past a mostly-closed door, and a place, in the corner near the dresser, to make tea.

She has no idea where she is, and even less comprehension of how she came to be here. It should be disturbing her, but it isn't. She can cope with all of it – with the ache in her body, with the blank in her mind (hanging, at the peripheries of her inner vision, like the drop at the edge of an explorer's map), but – she's alone.

She's alone, and the chain at her wrist is gone, and she's frightened for reasons she cannot explain.

“L,” she says, because the letter fits her mouth with the ease of her tongue against her teeth. She realises that her throat is dry, and she shifts over, searching amongst the cups for something that looks clean.

“I'm here,” says L's voice, and L is next to the bed, handing her a glass of water.

Light looks up at him, unsurprised-surprise making her neck sting as she jerks it. She wants to say something, but she doesn't know what, so she takes the glass from his hand and drinks. Drinks, and coughs, and drinks. Her tongue is heavy, telling her that she must have slept badly, uneasily. The room is quiet, not a noise from outside creeping in, not a sound from another room to be heard.

L shifts from one foot to the other and Light can hear it, can hear L's feet against the carpet.

She has the most absurd urge to cry, and she doesn't know why. She thinks she hates it.

She wants to say _thank you_, for the water, but instead finds her mouth saying, “You're really here?”

She doesn't know why she doubts it.

L takes the empty glass from her fingers, the pad of his thumb brushing against her wrist as he does so, perhaps to prove his tangibility. His face difficult to read. He motions her to scoot over a little, and sits on the bed beside her. She feels conscious of her naked skin beneath the sheets. She feels that it doesn't matter either way.

“It's over,” he says. Then, “What do you remember?”, and Light would find the question strange, except that her mind is full of holes and she knows it. She can see them, in her head, now, more and more, the more she wakes, and is drowning in the business of loathing her intellect; loathing her intellect, because she can see where the blanks end, can see where the blanks begin, can see, can see, and―

“Everything,” Light says, “but nothing at all. I remember you, beside me. I remember working together on the case, I remember...”

Her voice is breaking, because her brain knows what the rest of her cannot; because the logical progression of argument and reason is too clear for someone as brilliant as she.

“It was me, wasn't it?” she says, and the question gifts a part of her self to the detective at her side.

L purses his lips. “It isn't you,” he answers.

Light stares at that, and cannot think of what to say. She was Kira. Kira. Her cleverness knows it.

She studies the room. She wants to ask _how_ or _why_, because she knows her intuition is correct. But none of it makes sense, not why she's here, nor when the handcuffs had vanished, nor why―

Why L is looking at her like that.

“You sold your soul to Kira,” L says calmly. “However, after a fashion, so did I. And it was Kira who decided to save you, at the very end. And so here you are. Here we are, the both of us. That you can't remember is a side-effect I would be willing to explain at more detail, if you truly wished.”

Light processes that. No. Light stores it in her mind, because processing would imply some level of comprehension. His words, though, which ought to smack of utter nonsense, have already resonated as rational; rational, in the darkest corners of her mind.

She doesn't comprehend, but she feels. And she accepts.

She shifts, and her muscles ache, and it's almost pleasant now that her limbs have properly woken. She looks at the mess of the clothes, and feels the sheets against her bare thighs, and says softly, “I... you... did we?”

“Yes,” replies L.

“I don't remember,” says Light. She _can_ remember watching him, watching the gleam of the computer screens paling his face and tinting his hair. She can remember her annoyance, such a while ago now, when he had turned up at her college. She can remember the thrill of racing her mind against his. She can remember his hand, once, brushing crumbs from her cheek; lingering at the edge of her lips and making her shiver. She can remember the way her father had looked at them, disapproving, yet so certain of her, as his daughter, that he'd permitted her judgement on matters to prevail, even unto the act of chaining herself to the detective. Something about the remembered expression on her father's face doesn't feel right, though, as if there's something else there that she ought to be aware of, but it's pushing away from her, like a boat rocking against the edge of a pier. It's all pushing away from her, as if her brain doesn't want to know just as much as it actually does. Something tells her that she can't chase it now; something tells her that the attempt would turn cracks into chasms.

She turns her gaze back outwards. She looks at L looking at her. She feels as though the world is slipping from her grasp, but his eyes are steady. It's proof that she's lost, she thinks, when the idea of being able to remember L's fine hands upon her bare skin seems more valuable than remembering the rest.

“The memory of me would not be worth that,” says L pensively, as if he can see through her eyes and into her mind. “You have been granted a new start, Light-kun. You oughtn't want to remember. I'd advise you not to try.”

Light laughs, low and soft and bitter and amused. “Hypocrite, you know _you_ would fight to remember. You know you wouldn't follow your own advice. You're saying that I was Kira. If you were Kira, you would want to know.”

Her words belie the reality, though. She can feel it, inside herself, can feel that to take it in, to know, to remember, would be too much, too incomprehensible.

But she was Kira.

“I _need_ to know,” she says, regardless; foolhardy, desperate.

“No,” is all L replies.

The sun rises higher, outside the window, and turns buildings into gleaming mirrors.

“How long do you intend to keep me with you?” Light demands.

L tips his head to one side, his dark hair swinging, just a little, with the motion. “Until you forgive yourself. Until you grow tired of me,” he answers, without so much as a moment's hesitation.

 

*

There's a mess of clothes and cups on the beside table, when Light opens her eyes and, just for a breath, she doesn't know where she is. Again. The mess, the waking, the sliding disorientation. It doesn't last as long as it used to, though; just a heartbeat of uncertainty, just an undulation of doubt, and then she sees a pair of old jeans flung over the back of a chair, and it all comes crashing back to her.

Light – whose name is no longer Yagami – is rather of the opinion that her morning routine sucks.

It doesn't exactly help matters, that she's stuck in what feels like an endless cycle of jetlag.

But then there's the sweet scent of coffee, the cottony jangle of someone pulling apart the curtains with a whoosh of cloth and nimble wrists, and L is standing at the end of the bed, backlit by the sunrise over some new city.

“Mo'eh,” mumbles Light, which was supposed to sound like good morning, but which came out all wrong. The fact that she doesn't even bother with a correction, simply struggles free of the tangle of sheets – enough to sit up, anyway, enough to reach for the mug that L is holding out – is proof in the pudding that she's been around the English detective for considerably too long a time. The mug in Light's hands is hot, but not too hot, and her fingers knuckle against it like an anchor to reality. She breathes in the scent of it, clears her demons, and takes a sip. Coffee, she thinks, was a genius invention.

It just about makes up for the blurring routine of her mornings.

And L Lawliet makes up for the jetlag.

The bed shifts beneath the man's weight, as he sits himself down beside her; the sheets tug a little closer against Light's belly. L has probably been awake for hours, but Light doesn't mind any more; she's long ago given up trying to pretend that she doesn't need the extra sleep. Besides, L somehow almost always reappears, just like this, whenever she's waking. Turns out he's even more a creature of habit than she herself is.

“Morning,” Light says again, eyes sticky with sleep as she peers at her companion through the morning's peach-coloured light. This time the word curls properly from her tongue. The coffee is strong and rich. Three sips and she can already remember which country they're in. A fourth gives her the name of their hotel. Five provides even the finest details of the case they're working.

“Morning,” intones L gravely, thumbing his lip as he watches her drink.

It's been so long, since Light forgot the passion of her crimes and recollected her guilt. The knowledge slumbers in the corners of her mind, now, like a dragon curled-up and dozing. She still can't see it clearly. Her intellectual understanding does not, cannot, mesh with her visceral comprehensions. There is no memory. She cannot feel it in her stomach. And so the guilt is real but unreal, as if someone had whispered a story about a crime committed in her sleep. Still, she works, works and works, and each one saved is one less lost.

Light puts her empty mug on a pile of foreign-language newspapers, and runs her hands through her hair. It's longer, now, than it had been back in her student days. L likes to have something to play with, his fingers wandering from his mouth to the curve of her neck.

“How long?” she asks.

This, too, is part of their morning routine.

As is the way that L tips his head to one side, his dark hair swinging, just a little, with the motion, and answers, “Until you grow tired of me,” without so much as a moment's hesitation.

Light finds herself laughing.

*

There's a mess of clothes and cups on the bedside table, when Light opens her eyes. But the moon is bright tonight, and L's breathing is steady beside her, one of his hands warm against her arm.

And Light knows exactly where she is.


End file.
